Sony Responds to PS3 Backwards-Compatibility Critics

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As you may recall, Sony got a few people excited last Friday after they announced that European PS3s would no longer be sporting an Emotion engine chip — aka, “the thing that lets you play older games on your PS3″.

The community response (predictably) hovered somewhere in-between stunned incredulity and outright fury. You pay $600 for a console, you kind of expect it’s going to handle your back catalogue.

Well, it’s taken a few days for an ‘official’ response to make its way down from Sony on the Mountaintop, but lo, such a thing comes to you via Sony’s “unofficial” threespeech blog. Since threespeech essentially represents a kind of talking muppet head for Sony’s PR department, don’t expect to see the kind of rage and hurling of blunt objects in the interviewer’s questions to which you might otherwise feel entitled — but hey, at least the article DOES refer to the lobotomized PS3s as ‘degraded models’. That’s gotta count for something.

Here’s the point-counterpoint, clipped straight from the blog:

Q: People weren’t expecting this announcement. Surely we have the right to know the number of PAL supported games before the launch?

A: We have been assessing the extent of backward compatibility, and will continue to do so right up until launch. It is therefore not possible to provide a specific number of backwards compatible titles at this stage, but close to launch consumers will be able to check whether their titles are compatible with PS3 by looking at the list of compatible titles at http://faq.eu.playstation.com/bc. This site will be available on 23rd March to meet launch day.

Q: Does this mean that the PS2 hardware chips have been removed completely and replaced with software-only emulation?

A: The original PS3 used the Emotion Engine/Graphics Synthesizer to emulate PS2 titles. With the latest European specification we have removed the Emotion Engine, retaining the graphics chip.

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